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[0:30] Bruce Gotlieb: Hello and welcome to Behind the Awards, friends. I am Bruce, flying solo today here on Behind the Awards. That clip was Catherine Zeta-Jones winning her 2010 Tony Award for Best Actress in a Musical for her role in A Little Night Music. Gonna share a little bit of Broadway news with you today. We have some new announcements coming in. The revival of Chess, which most people who I've spoken to are so excited about, did find its home. It's going to be going to the Imperial Theatre, which coincidentally was where Lea Michele made her Broadway debut back in 1995 in the production of Les Mis playing Yonko Zett. And now she is getting ready to embark on this highly anticipated revival this fall, which is very exciting.

On top of that, we also got an announcement. The musical formerly known as Gun & Powder, which had a premiere at New Jersey's Paper Mill Playhouse back in April of 2024, which has now been rebranded and named Wanted, is getting an industry presentation. It's going to be starring Solea Pfeiffer and Lissy LaFontaine, as well as Broadway veteran Will Swenson. Will was last on Broadway in A Beautiful Noise, the Neil Diamond musical. Solea just finished her run in Moulin Rouge. They're embarking on this true story of a pair of black twin sisters in 1893, Texas. They became outlaws, eventually legends in their own right. It's not known whether these three will continue on with the project. They are leading the industry workshop, and the first single from the production has been released.

So you can go and download that and give it a listen. The first single, Gun & Powder, from the forthcoming Wanted, the studio EP, is performed by LaFontaine Pfeiffer, as well as the Wanted studio cast, and it's available on Spotify and Apple. We'll be keeping our eye on this one, as it's always exciting when something new is coming to Broadway. We have Rupert Holmes on the show today. He just is off the heels of Pirates, the Penzance musical, adapting the book for that show. And, of course, his well-known other works, whether it be the Piña Colada song, the Mystery of Edwin Drood, Curtains, the list goes on and on. So let's bring him out and let you guys hear from Rupert.

[3:03] Eila Mell: Well, I am so excited, Bruce, to introduce my friend, and now yours, Rupert Holmes. Hello, Rupert.

[3:11] Rupert Holmes: Hello.

[3:12] Eila Mell: Really nice to meet you.

[3:14] Rupert Holmes: Oh, well. Thank you so much for joining us. We were thrilled to be able to say hello to you when we were at Pirates, the Penzance musical, face-to-face, and invite you to have a little conversation about what the creation of adapting that book has been.

[3:29] Rupert Holmes: Yeah. It's a job I was preparing for from age 12 on.

[3:35] Eila Mell: A big Gilbert and Sullivan fan?

[3:37] Rupert Holmes: Yeah. Oh, yes. And I remember having a recording. Recordings were expensive with my pocketbook. I could get one album every five times I mowed a lawn. And so I never could afford the entire recording. I would always have to get a highlights recording. And I had one on Richmond Records, which was a knockoff of London Records. It was where they put their old product. And I had highlights of Doily Car Opera, highlights of Pirates of Penzance. And I listened to A Policeman's Lot Is Not a Happy One, and there was a chord in it. And I thought, what is that chord? Why is it doing such strange things to me? And I got the music. I could read music. I was a clarinetist, but I taught myself piano. And I studied the chorus and said, oh, he's not using the bass note.

The bass note is not the root of the chord. You mean you can have a note in the bass that isn't the root of the chord? Which is, of course, a very standard thing. But I said, that's magic. That chord. I started using that chord a lot in pop writing. And it actually was on some of my earliest records. Even the first hit record I had, top 20 hit record, I used that chord from A Policeman's Lot Is Not a Happy One. No one in the audience, of course, no teenager is saying, well, obviously, that Sullivan is really quite a fellow, isn't he? Well, he's Sterling. So I loved Gilbert and Sullivan. I loved the fact that it combined everything that I sort of loved. Comedy and clever rhymes. And Sullivan was a terrific composer.

People tend to not take him seriously because everything he was writing ended up being funny in one way or another. But some of his symphonic writing comes through in Pirates. There's sections there where you're saying, well, that's as good as Toccata and Fugue in D minor by Bach. That's brilliant. So it was classical music, which I loved. It was pop. It was theatrical. It was funny. It was completely loony. And yet grounded in this great writing they both did. So a devotee my entire life.

[5:54] Bruce Gotlieb: Bruce and I, you know, we talk about the Tonys quite a lot. And so we couldn't decide whether this was going to be considered a new musical or a revival because the book was different. You changed the book somewhat. So did you know going in that this was a revival? I mean, what was your point of view?

[6:14] Rupert Holmes: Well, the Roundabout Theatre Company specializes in revivals. And it was clear going into it that we were doing a revival of Pirates of Penzance. But Scott Ellis, who I've worked with, he directed the musical I wrote with Katerin Epp, Curtains, starred David Hyde Pierce, who was also in Pirates. David Hyde Pierce won the Tony Award for Best Actor in a Musical, Curtains. Yes. In the role that I got to create for him. And then he also did the revival, the Broadway revival, of The Mystery of Bedouin Druid in 2013. And I love Scott and loved working with him. And he said, we're doing Pirates. And by the way, the reason it came about, he tells me, is I was receiving an award from NIGASP, the New York Gilbert & Sullivan Players, a Living Legacy of Gilbert & Sullivan Award, because some of my work has been in the style of Gilbert & Sullivan, sort of kept audiences aware of that. My songs, I have patter songs that go very fast in The Mystery of Bedouin Druid. Yeah. You know that.

[7:23] Eila Mell: I do.

[7:24] Rupert Holmes: So I was giving this award and as a friend, he attended with Deb Monk, who had, who was not only his friend and my friend, but had been the other lead in Curtains. And they were there and there was a lot of Gilbert & Sullivan being sung. And including by my brother, Richard Holmes, who's a fixture of the New York Gilbert & Sullivan Players. And he thought, I wonder how long it's been since Pirates of Penzance has been done on Broadway. And he looked it up and it had been like over four years. The version with Linda Ronstadt and Kevin Klein and Rex Smith. And he said, well, we could revive it, but I want to make it different. I wouldn't just want to do that version. I want to do something that's new from the ground up, even though it's a revival.

And he looked into where pirates in the United States had been located. He hit upon both Florida and New Orleans. And then both seemed to know at the same time that Gilbert & Sullivan had actually opened Pirates of Penzance in New York, ahead of London, which is an extraordinary thing for two British composers to do. Yeah. It's part of the play, as you know, as you now know, having seen it. So we soon launched into this idea of a very, very different Pirates of Penzance. And the reason we call it Pirates of Penzance was we want people to understand that, yes, this is sort of that musical, that Penzance musical, but it's not like any version of it you've ever seen before. And the idea of the second we talked about New Orleans, I thought, well, jazz.

[9:09] Eila Mell: Yeah.

[9:10] Rupert Holmes: And ragtime and blues and syncopation and all the things that you don't think of when you think of Arthur Sullivan's composer. So this is the first Gilbert & Sullivan show I know that's got a banjo in the orchestra. It's so much fun, too. A lot of banjos and Gilbert & Sullivan, normally. So we knew that from the outset, to answer your question, sorry, it took a long time to get there, we knew we were doing both a revival and a completely new version of the show. So, for example, I'm nominated for a Drama Desk for Best Adaptation. If we were doing... So that lets you know sort of that this is different.

[9:49] Eila Mell: Yeah.

[9:50] Rupert Holmes: This category. So it's new, the songs are new, and yet they're based on the Gilbert & Sullivan songs. So about half the lyrics are in the style of Gilbert, but they make use of the fact that we're in the United States, that we're in New Orleans, and we're speaking their contemporary American. Oscar Wilde thinks that the British and the Americans are two nations divided by a common language, and that's sort of what we're doing here. We're taking advantage of... How would Gilbert have said that if he were speaking in our parlors?

[10:28] Eila Mell: Interesting.

[10:29] Rupert Holmes: And I love that you added Gilbert & Sullivan as characters in this version.

[10:34] Rupert Holmes: Well, we wanted to frame it.

[10:36] Eila Mell: Yeah.

[10:37] Rupert Holmes: You know, it's one thing to say, oh, we'll do a jazz Pirates of Penzance. But I thought, well, but there's a logical reason why that could have happened. And it was the fact that they wanted to get an American copyright on their work, because as is explained in humorous fashion, I'm going to do this in a very dry way here, but in humorous fashion, the show, Gilbert explains to the audience that the first time they came to New York, they found 15 productions. So their hit show, their British hit show, HMS Pinafore, up and running already. Isn't that wonderful? Right. None of those productions paying them a single penny. I'll repeat, it's the United States that didn't honor a British copyright.

So they decided to rather than let these pirated versions continue, that they would make sure that their next work, turned out to be Pirates of Penzance, had an American copyright ahead of its British premiere. So they came to New York and Philadelphia and Boston, and the show was touring. And so we thought, what if they swung around to New Orleans? We found there was a production. I don't know if it was theirs under their helm, but I thought, what would Sullivan have thought walking the streets of New Orleans and walking in Congo Square and hearing all these sultry rhythms and the sounds of the Caribbean? People think of New Orleans as the South, but it is considered also the northernmost part city of the Caribbean.

And I thought, well, maybe he would be just intoxicated with all these rhythms and say, you know, I think it should work. It's local, these sounds and this thing called jazz into the show. And Gilbert said, well, I've just learned that there are real pirates here, not our made up pirates. They walk the streets still. They were allies of the United States during the war that they had, that skirmish they had with us in 1812. So why don't I work the real American pirates into the story as well? And then Gilbert, but then Gilbert says, the only thing is I want to protect my patter songs, the ones I've been all that time constructing. I think I will play the modern Matrix show. And Sullivan says, it's fine, okay, but how about I play the Sergeant Police? And so they're in the show throughout the show.

[13:02] Eila Mell: Yes, we do.

[13:03] Rupert Holmes: Yeah, absolutely. But I, well, we have this big finale and I thought, you know, he would, he would pop up in the pit.

[13:14] Eila Mell: Yeah.

[13:15] Rupert Holmes: And conduct the thing himself and say, we're going to do that. It's a big number. I'd let me have the baton. So, yeah, they're part of the spirit of the show. And every now and then Gilbert talks to us. It's Gilbert, not as the modern Matrix show.

[13:24] Eila Mell: Yeah.

[13:25] Rupert Holmes: And we see Sullivan conducting at one point too.

[13:27] Eila Mell: Right.

[13:28] Rupert Holmes: And David Hyde Pierce is so perfectly cast in that role.

[13:31] Eila Mell: He is amazing.

[13:32] Rupert Holmes: He does every night. That's a little different in the modern Matrix show. He, um, when he gets to what the meaning of a certain word is every night, it's almost like a way to try to break up the cast. We'll always come up with a different definition of what it might be. And they never know what he's going to say at that moment. And it's, it's very real and authentically improvised. He's just brilliant as the modern Matrix show.

[14:30] Rupert Holmes: We have 26 washboards on stage at one point. That's a pretty great moment. All being genuinely played. And then they had to learn parasol technique because you know how important it is to know how to twirl a parasol in life. You know, I was very inspired as a little girl by Marlo Thomas in the beginning of *That Girl* with her parasol.

[14:48] Eila Mell: Well, did you, was there a parasol?

[14:50] Rupert Holmes: Yeah. Oh yes. It made quite an impression on me. So the collaboration between you and Scott Ellis and Warren Carlyle is really something special to watch. How important is it to you to have great partners like that?

[15:06] Rupert Holmes: Well, I'll add a fourth name to that equation, which is our musical director, Joseph Jober, who is conducting the orchestra when Sullivan doesn't pop up and he's doing all the heavy lifting. It's a matter of when Sullivan pops up in the orchestra pit to conduct the number, Joseph steps down to a lower level, but there's a special dedicated TV camera for him. And the cast still gets to watch Joseph conducting the show and they can ignore Arthur Sullivan conducting it. Probably a good idea.

[15:39] Eila Mell: Yeah.

[15:40] Rupert Holmes: The actor, Preston, is just so adroit. He does a tap. Who knew that Arthur Sullivan was a great tap dancer? I mean, I was amazed at that tap number.

[15:53] Rupert Holmes: Yeah. We decided to, again, do things differently. That is traditionally a number for the sergeant of police being echoed in unison and rather solemnly by his police force. And in trying to come up with a way to do it anew, I thought, why don't we, the police are supposedly, they've already exited to go off and do battle with pirates. Why do they come back on? Right. We couldn't actually figure it out. And the truth of the matter is it doesn't make any sense in the original version that they come back because they're supposed to be taking care of the pirates. So I thought, well, if they'd gone off to battle, leaving the major general's daughters behind, now they're in danger, maybe the number is with the sergeant of police and all the daughters. So it's the first time that I know where you've had a policeman's lot is not a happy one where the echoing voices and the background riffs and all like that are coming from women, not from the police.

[16:52] Eila Mell: Yeah, absolutely.

[16:52] Rupert Holmes: So anytime we could find a new, a fresh way to do something that people have seen another way, we kind of seized it. So working with Scott, working with Warren, working with Joseph, first of all, Scott and Warren and I worked on *The Mystery of Edwin Drood* together. So there's that, you know, when you've gone through bringing up a musical with people, there's a sense of camaraderie and trust. And people are willing to, you know, if someone says, you know, I have a good idea, we tend to not say, well, what is it? We have a tendency to say, well, let's see it. Let's do it. And Scott, as a director, Scott Ellis is very, let's try it. We'll see if it works.

[17:36] Rupert Holmes: And there was one time in *Curtains* where two days before we opened at the Amundsen in LA, I said, I think we've got a song in the well, I think it needs to be, he said, well, let's do it. I said, yeah, but we'll open in two days. He said, I'm ready for it. Let's try it. Let's see what happens when we do it. And it was an improvement.

[17:56] Eila Mell: Yeah.

[17:57] Rupert Holmes: But he's that kind of guy. He's not like looking for, that might be dangerous to try that. He loves it. So it's just, it's the element of trust and respect. Warren is a founder of invention who knew that I would say, Penn's dance was a dance show.

[18:12] Eila Mell: I know, right.

[18:13] Rupert Holmes: I know. And it's such a dance show. It's wonderful. From the first moment to the last curtain, it feels like almost every number has some really cool dancing. Speaking of experimentation and you mentioned *The Mystery of Edwin Drood*, was it a collaborative idea or whose idea was it that where you were going to put the storytelling in the audience's hands?

[18:39] Rupert Holmes: Because I know in the revival there, there's a vote process of who does what and how the mystery unfolds at the end of each show. Was that something you always baked into it or was that?

[18:49] Rupert Holmes: *The Mystery of Edwin Drood* was that rarity of a musical that's basically created by one person. I was the first person in Tony history to get Tony awards as the book writer, as the lyricist, and as the composer. And I also did the orchestrations. They did not that year have the category of best orchestrations, so I didn't get that. I did get the Drama Desk for, they did have the category. So, much as most of theory, including all the theory that I've done, is wildly collaborative, *The Mystery of Edwin Drood* was this thing where I walked into Joe Papp's office and said, I have this idea for a musical based on an unfinished novel by Charles Dickens. He was hoping to write the greatest mystery of all time.

And then he died, leaving no clues. He said, well, how would you finish it? He said, what are you going to come out? You're going to come up with the ending Dickens didn't come up with? I said, no. I said, my thought is that I can write this so that as long as each actor knows what they're going to say and sing and where they're going to go staging wise, if they are voted as the murderer or as the true lovers or as the detective in disguise, I think I can write multiple endings, possibly as many as 400 different combinations of endings.

[20:13] Rupert Holmes: And to me, that is the very height of theatricality. It's something at that time you couldn't do in any other medium. I said, let the audience decide every evening and you could go seven nights in a row and see seven different murders confessed for seven different reasons. And can you, can you, I said, I think I can. After we did this, the first show in Central Park, *The Mystery of Edwin Drood*, and if they went gangsters with just a 40, it's mad. They had no idea what this was going to be. And they sleep on voting fear that the murderer was, had no idea if he was going to be the murderer that evening. And it was just thrust upon that particular actor in that moment. And he had the ammunition already ready to go, but, and it was so live, so theatrical when it was all over Joe Papp turned to me and we were sitting in the audience alone and he said, well, it works.

[21:08] Eila Mell: So you came this far with it and you weren't sure if it worked or not?

[21:14] Rupert Holmes: I mean, we had basically what would become the Broadway cast in Central Park, Betty Buckley away and George Rollins, who won the Tony for best actor control, and I couldn't believe that it wasn't until we did the first show in front of an audience that he said, I guess you can do that. And how I was baked in, Bruce, from the beginning. And so when we did the revival, we simply kept that device. I do remember a couple of days before we opened Joe Papp was a little frightened. And he did send me, I know how to save the show. I said, save the show? We haven't performed it yet, but he was worried as a producer can get and said, we just choose one ending. We pick it, we pick it. And that's the ending we do.

And that's it. We don't vote. I said, but there's, it's the very essence of what this show is. There's, and he said, all right, all right. Okay. I'll take your word that that has always been that way. And that was the fun of it. I saw it many times and it was always different. And I'll be, I believe you performed it too.

[22:19] Eila Mell: Well, yes, I do.

[22:21] Rupert Holmes: I was, I was ever a murderer. I was, yeah. That was fun. People love to vote for Rosa Bud. She's so seemingly innocent and naive and a victim. And they love it when she turns and turns out to be quite mad. And by the way, one of the lovely features of *The Mystery of Edwin Drood* is I've just said that I played the murder at the murder, but that was a certain performances, right? So it's the one murder mystery where you can tell someone who done it and you're not giving anything away because that may not be who done it when the other person sees.

[22:56] Eila Mell: Absolutely.

[22:58] Rupert Holmes: There are some songs in *Pirates* getting back to *Pirates* that are not typically in *Pirates*. And that's fun too. Was there ever a consideration to put the Pina Colada song in *Pirates*?

[23:11] Rupert Holmes: You know, I'm very alarmed because in the middle of, I am the pirate king. Suddenly saw that Warren has the character of Ruth played by Jinkx Monsoon bring up a pineapple, a coconut shell with a tropical, with a flower, maybe it's a parasol in it and a straw. And I thought, is he trying to work the Pina Colada song? No, we didn't know. What happened is that, for example, the character of Ruth, just because something is a classic doesn't mean that it doesn't have some flaws. I was always thrown by the fact that in the original version of *Pirates of Penzance*, the character of Ruth basically evaporates at the end of Act One. She comes back to sing Paradox, a trio, but there's no actual resolution for her character and she doesn't, she's sort of cast away.

And that's been a problem that people have dealt with for years in terms of what do we do with Ruth? Do we pair her off with someone when she has no solo song? I thought I've got to find a song for that. And I, so I went through all of the Gilbert and Sullivan literature and I found a not a particularly well-known song from *The Mikado*.

[24:22] Rupert Holmes: All Alone and Yet Alive, in which someone talks about, and I thought this was a wonderful idea for Gilbert to come up with, but the fact that people say, oh, would you leave me? I'll die. And then someone leaves you and you don't die. Oh my God. And I had a lot of, I, when you left me, I thought I'd die. And then to my total horror, I discovered I didn't. And now what do I do now? I just have to drag myself through the rest of my life. Art. And I thought that would be a good song for Ruth to sing alone on a stage.

[24:58] Eila Mell: Yeah, true.

[24:59] Rupert Holmes: And it's a wonderful, it's performed wonderfully by Jinkx Monsoon and she, just everyone in the audience I think feels for her deeply. She just, such a dilemma for her. We do find her a happy ending, which is kind of nice. So, but yes, that's how that came about. I thought that since Gilbert and Sullivan were in the United States with *Pirates of Penzance*, because their previous show, *Ancient Miss Cinephore* had been such a big hit in the USA that, I thought, you know, wouldn't they be, they sort of want to work one of the numbers from their previous hit into this show so that, you know, almost a medley of our greatest hits sort of after. So, when we got to the end of Act One and I didn't really, there's no great curtain number for Act One. It just kind of ends on it. It isn't what we are accustomed to on Broadway as that killer one number where the audience has to come back.

[25:57] Eila Mell: Right.

[25:57] Rupert Holmes: But well, maybe they would do a big production number from *Pinafore*, their own version of that. And I thought, well, there's first number of *Pinafore's*, we sail the ocean blue. But now I'm in New Orleans. So wouldn't it be, I got to sail the ocean blues. And so we turn it into kind of a lively blues number, replete with the more than two dozen washboards. I mean, it's astounding.

[26:23] Eila Mell: Rupert.

[26:23] Rupert Holmes: It's a good way to end the act.

[26:25] Eila Mell: Rupert, I can't believe we're out of time already. I hope that you'll come back and I would love to do a deep dive into all your shows.

[26:31] Rupert Holmes: I would love that. And it's a pleasure to be both a listener to your podcast, as well as a guest.

[26:39] Eila Mell: Um, so yeah, thank you for watching Broadway.

[26:42] Rupert Holmes: Oh, do you have anything on the horizon that people might not know about that you can talk about?

[26:47] Rupert Holmes: A couple of things. First of all, I just came off a bestselling novel, New York Times bestseller, that went to number six on the New York Times chart. That's called *Murder Your Employer*.

[26:57] Eila Mell: I love the book.

[27:00] Rupert Holmes: Thank you. It's funny and it's devious and it's wicked and it's an escape. I think it very much takes you out of this world into another world. And so I have a sequel to that that's coming out called *Murder Your Mate*, mate can mean many different things. It doesn't mean house.

[27:21] Eila Mell: Right.

[27:21] Rupert Holmes: Absolutely. So that's coming out. I'm working on two really exciting, huge projects because I have collaborators and I don't have their permission to talk about it yet. It'll be about the world. I'll have to keep it to myself, but you'll, when I know I can tell people about it, I'll, you'll be the first people I'll mention.

[27:39] Eila Mell: Oh, we'd love to have.

[27:40] Rupert Holmes: Fantastic.

[27:42] Eila Mell: Oh, well, you know, I adore you and we will be in touch very soon. We'll have you back and just a thrill to have you. Thank you so much, Rupert.

[27:52] Rupert Holmes: Thank you. And we'll see everyone next time on *Behind the Awards*. Bye bye.